Lanka doesn’t love India less, or China more

Text of a presentation by Prof. Rajiva Wijesinha, MP at the International Conference on India-Sri Lanka Relations: Strengthening SAARC Centre for Indian Ocean Studies (CIOS) Osmania University, Hyderabad, November 8 - 9, 2012

It is clear that Sri Lanka stands today at a cross-roads. Following the successful conclusion of the war against LTTE terrorism, Sri Lanka has an opportunity to build up a prosperous pluralistic future. This however seems increasingly difficult in the light of continuing international criticism, which has in turn put Sri Lanka on the defensive. This has contributed to failure to move swiftly on inclusivity and reconciliation, and I fear that unless there is greater trust, and confidence building, on all sides, we can only look forward to greater tensions, with increasing difficulties for not only Sri Lanka, but also India and the entire SAARC region.

In this context it is also important for India to recognize that she too stands at a cross-roads. Given the remarkable economic development of recent years, India will obviously attract increasing attention on the world stage. In the prevailing state of international relations, this will involve enticements to fall in line with the oppositional approach to global relations that marked the post Second World War period. The Cold War was characterized by efforts to build up confrontational alliances, and this was accompanied by demonization of those who failed to play ball. This conceptual framework has unfortunately continued into an era in which it has no business.

The greatest victim of this approach was India. What I see as the idealistic but also immensely practical vision of Nehru, to position India as a leader of Non-Alignment, fell prey to the refusal of bigger powers to accept that balance was possible. The obvious fact that India was the biggest gap in the encirclement of the Soviet Union and its allies that the various Treaty Organizations of the forties and fifties set up led to hostility, and support for countries that were seen as a counterweight to India. The saddest victim of this theoretically positive, most favoured nation, type of approach was Pakistan, where the secular determination of Jinnah, perhaps misplaced but essentially liberal in spirit, was overtaken by fundamentalism and militarism, since these were seen in the dark days of the Cold War as the best weapons against evil Communist empires.

New Cold War

But India too suffered from this demonization, and deliberately so I fear. The continuing problems of terrorism it faces arose from this oppositioning tendency. It was no coincidence, after all, that when the United States ultimately awoke to the threat presented by the monster it had created, and bombed terrorist training camps after the attack on the USS Cole, the victims were Kashmiri terrorists being trained by the same dispensation as had trained terrorists against the Soviet backed regime in Afghanistan.

All that should be water under the bridge, and the greater enlightenment with regard to India that now characterizes the West is to be welcomed. But old habits die hard, and I fear that India is now being inveigled into similar involvement in oppositioning alliances, as Pakistan was in the old days. The enemy now is not the Soviet Union, with India seen as an acolyte that also has to be contained, but rather China, which of course had been used in the seventies and eighties as a counterweight to the Evil Empire that was seen then as stretching from Vladivostok to Berlin, and from the North Pole to Cape Cormorin.

International relations

The demonizing of China that is a necessary part of persuading India to get involved in this new Cold War has contributed to a perverse presentation of China’s role in Sri Lanka. Thus Chinese involvement in Sri Lanka is seen as excluding India and a threat to its security. This is highlighted in discussion of the Hambantota Port development, whereas the project was of course offered to India first, and to China only after India was unable to take it on.

The fact that India then began to fast forward the Kankesanthurai Port development, which it had pledged to do some years back, but held back on for a range of reasons, makes it clear that Sri Lanka has no plans for exclusivity, and Indian involvement in our development is seen as a necessity.

But there will continue to be propaganda suggesting the opposite, and this is apparent in the efforts of the diaspora to demonize Sri Lanka and China equally in Indian eyes. Having failed to persuade India to intervene on the side of terrorists in 2009, the diaspora has now developed a more sophisticated way of pressurizing India, and stresses what it claims is Sri Lankan reliance on China. This is of course a persuasive factor as far as the West is concerned too, and the combined efforts of diaspora detractors and Cold War warriors in Washington can well upset Indo-Sri Lankan relations.

The problem is compounded, I should add, by two types of Cold War warriors within Sri Lanka, where the Foreign Ministry has singularly failed to develop policy guidelines but is instead prey to old ideologies and youthful emotionalism. In the first place, just as India for a long time had officials obsessed by the events of 1962, who saw China as a continuing threat, so Sri Lanka has officials who are obsessed by 1987 and see India as the basis of all our problems.

This school of thought is led by those who entered wholeheartedly into the Jayewardene view of international relations, when we became a willing ally of the West, more Catholic indeed than the Pope, in trying to flog Trincomalee and its oil tanks to the Americans when they were not particularly interested. After all they had the use by then of Diego Garcia, following the horrendous shenanigans with regard to its inhabitants that Britain perpetrated during the last extraordinarily dark days of colonialism.

Those Sri Lankan Cold Warriors, instead of admitting that the threat Jayewardene tried to present to India extenuates, even if it does not excuse, the training of terrorists that India engaged in, hold India solely responsible for the debacle of 1987. Instead of attributing the absurdities of the 13th Amendment to stupid Sri Lankan drafting, without attention to principle, they claim that it is all India’s fault. Supported by the prejudice and chauvinism of some Sri Lankan journalists, this world view naturally engenders resentment amongst Indians, and contributes to increasing suspicions on either side.

To be continued